Sunday, April 06, 2008

New Nail Polish for Second Life

I just finished revamping all the nail polish I sell in Second Life to include a variation that will make the bottom of the avatar legs look like the inside of a pair of pants, when the AV is wearing pants, instead of showing the skin on those polygons. (This is necessary because we don't actually wear clothes in SL. We have textures that change our appearance, and our body mesh is also "pushed out" to make it look like we have pants that aren't clinging to our legs and things. But really, it's our ankles there. So unless we have some shading on another of the texture layers on our legs, it looks like our ankles, not the inside of a pair of pants.)

While I was at it, I made another whole collection, with 20 colors based on some popular nail polish colors for this Spring/Summer.

And I started a program that I've been meaning to put in place for some time, so that people who collect my nail polish can get a freebie for being such good customers! If you buy seven shades, you can trade in the seven proofs of purchase you get in each bag for any one color of your choice.

The Proofs of Purchase were the thing that was holding me up, because I wanted them to look like nail polish bottles. But last night the Grid was down for most of the night, and I was up, so I made the bottles. Today, when the grid finally came back on line, I tested them, and they worked just as I hoped they would!

They are made with a Sculpty; but it's actually two prims. One that's the shiny bottle surface, and a second one that has the top and the white lettering on it. This lets me have shine that doesn't obscure the words, and also allows me to change the color of the "nail polish" so that I don't have to upload a whole lot of textures. I'm quite pleased with them!

3 comments:

So today I tried giving myself a manicure in SL. I was using Chip Midnight's UV templates, and I failed miserably. First I ended up with nail polish on the inside of my fingers, and then when I I got it on the right side, it didn't match up with my av's nails. Do you know of a nail polish template? Or how do you do it? I've searched and searched and can't find any info on making nail polish in SL. Any help you could offer would be very much appreciated! You can message me in-world at Lilia Quinnell. Thanks a bunch! -Lilia

I don't have time to do a step by step; but if you go into your character folder you'll find a file called "nailpolish_alpha.tga".

On the Mac, you find the character folder by right clicking on the Second Life Viewer (probably in your Applications folder) and choosing "Show Package Contents" from the menu.

Then it's Contents > Resources > character

I have no idea where it is on the PC, because I don't use one for SL. but it'll be somewhere in the folder where your viewer is.

Once you have the file, open it, and you'll see the fingernails clearly in white and gray against a black ground. Just make everything that's not black white, and clean up the edges, and you'll be good to go. (The gradations to gray are because whoever made the AV thought that women apply nailpolish from the nail bed to the tip; so if you have a little nail polish, you don't have any at the tips, and if you have a lot, it's always going to be more opaque at the bed. Go figure.)

If you want polish on your toes, as well, you can see the toenails best in lowerbody_color.tga in the same folder. But it's not very reliable because we don't have mesh toes, and people have put the toes in different places on different skins.

Most people who want toes use sculpted ones now, anyway, of course.

But that will should give you the placement for the fingernails, anyway!